The Red Mayor (La Giunta)

by Alessandro Scippa

documentary - Italy, 78’, 2022

directed by Alessandro Scippa
produced by Antonella Di Nocera
cinematography Giancarlo Cardillo
editing Mauro Santini
original soundtrack Canio Loguercio and Leandro Sorrentino
sound mixing Rosalia Cecere
sound editing and design Valerio Baiocchi
color correction Simona Infante
film development coordinator Claudia Canfora
archival research Maria Porzia De Filippis
Parallelo 41 Produzioni’s office Grazia De Micco, Claudia Canfora, Isabella Mari, Irene Pompeo
with Lucia Valenzi and Marco Valenzi, Federico Geremicca, Antonio Scippa and Floriana Mazzuca, Aldo Di Nocera and Antonella Di Nocera
with the friendly participation of Renato Carpentieri
and with Eleonora Puntillo, Emma Maida, Eugenio Donise, Aldo Cennamo, Antonio Bassolino, Mimmo Jodice, Luciano Ferrara, Gianni Fiorito, Roberto De Simone, Berardo Impegno, Alessandro Sodano, Antonio Sodano, Giulio Baffi, Marco Demarco, Nino Ferraiuolo, Francesco Iorio, Franco Cortese, Benito Visca
a production Parallelo 41 produzioni
with Luce Cinecittà
in collaboration with Fondazione Valenzi, Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico
supported by MIC - Direzione Generale Cinema e audiovisivo, Regione Campania, Fondazione Film Commission Regione Campania
film archives Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico, Archivio Luce Cinecittà, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, INA - Institut National de l'audiovisuel, BBC Motion Gallery / Getty Images, RSI - Radiotelevisione Svizzera
other repertoires Fondazione Valenzi, Scippa's family, Riccardo Notte's family films, Mimmo Jodice's photographies, Luciano Ferrara's photographies
thanks for the collaboration for the digitization of the repertoires Re-framing home movies, RI-PRESE memory keepers, Laboratorio di Digitalizzazione e Restauro della Società Umanitaria – Cineteca Sarda di Cagliari, Passo_Ridotto
graphic by Andrea Cioffi

1975. Maurizio Valenzi becomes the first communist mayor of Napoli, the biggest city in the South of Italy. Through interviews with the protagonists of the time and unpublished archive material, this is the story of a group of women and men who tried to realize the dream of a politics able to build proximity to people. A charismatic mayor and a great team of councilors, planted the seeds of a new idea of a city, which at the time still bore the scars of the post war period and a recent cholera outbreak. But, with the terrible Earthquake of 1980 and the economic interests generated by the "reconstruction business" the political and criminal balance were profoundly changed, and the fate of Napoli is marked by new forms of organization of the Camorra which today, as then, continues to influence the life of the city. That administrative experience, with its human distinctiveness, the civil values and ideals that characterized it, represents a unique historical moment. An experience that can also make us question how and why Italian communism, with strong social and cultural mass ties, could be swept away together with the ghosts of real communism in the 20th century. With the interviews to the councilors of that dream-team and to the daughters and sons of those who are not there anymore, the film proposes, in a prismatic tale, fragments of images that in the mirrors and refractions of today are nostalgically confronted with the past. That past, thanks to an extraordinary public and private repertoire, tells of a community that at that time tried to build a "Normalcy". Those wounds, which could not be healed, are hidden in the fascinating and evocative extraordinariness for which Napoli has always been known.